October 24, 2015 — Today, we’re happy to release the Halloween Icon Set, a set of 19 icons designed and created by Manuela Langella and free to be used in private as well as commercial projects. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms isn’t cool. A big thank you to Manuela Langella for designing this wonderful icon set — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts! Keep up the brilliant work! Read more…

October 23, 2015 — What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at. Read more…

October 22, 2015 — Changing your workflow can be a real challenge if you don’t know where to start or understand how to embark on the change. Fabio Benedetti has met with many designers (graphic, interaction, UI, etc.) who stick to old software because they are familiar and in their comfort zone, or because they are too scared to take the “leap of faith” and try something new, but change, as scary as it may be, most of the time is a good thing — first, because you learn how to do new things and, secondly, because feeling challenged and getting out of our comfort zone every once in a while is beneficial. Read more…

October 21, 2015 — Did you ever take a walk through the entire Unicode table? It’s the history of our civilization expressed in typography. It might be organized in an arbitrary fashion and not explained well, but it’s all here: languages, cultures, concepts. Spaces are here, too. There’s the one with an agent good enough to have gotten it the biggest key on everyone’s keyboard, but there are many more: the very narrow hair and thin spaces, the super-wide en and em spaces, and a few others in between. Let’s find out what other space characters there are, what their heritage is, and how they can be useful today. Read more…

October 19, 2015 — To be successful in designing the first major Apple Watch app for launch, the entire way Cole Sletten thought about app design needed an overhaul. The patterns and processes that became standard for other devices were of little help and, in many cases, could actively hinder efforts to create a beautiful, functional and user-centric watch experience. Designing apps for the Apple Watch requires thinking in a way that’s unlike the way you design for any other device. As you get familiar with these new patterns of interaction, there is a huge opportunity for designers and brands that harness the power of this device and deliver on its promise — a seamless user experience that carefully balances information, intimacy and interruption. Read more…

October 16, 2015 — What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at. Read more…

October 16, 2015 — Building persuasive user experiences is like a relationship and you need to treat it like one. So, what do you want? A one-night stand or a lasting partnership? There are three common challenges when engaging users with a product: Sign-up challenge: seducing your users, first-time use challenge: falling in love with your product, and ongoing engagement challenge: staying in love. Your approach to engaging users should be appropriately adjusted to the relationship you have with them. We will examine the three stages of a user relationship and what tools are appropriate to use for each challenge. This article is a summary of Anders’ talk on designing with persuasive patterns at the Push Conference 2015. Read more…

October 14, 2015 — Starting with version 2.1, WordPress provides the Walker abstract class, with the specific function of traversing these tree-like data structures. But an abstract class does not produce any output by itself. It has to be extended with a concrete child class that builds the HTML bricks for specific lists of items. In this article, Carlo Daniele will explore some of the most common uses of the Walker class. Note, however, that the following examples do not cover all possible applications and alternative ways to take advantage of the class. But you’ll discover more just by making use of your imagination and your skills as a programmer. Read more…

October 14, 2015 — From a high-level perspective, web components will enable better composability, reusability and interoperability of front-end web application elements by providing a common way to write components in HTML. In this article, Sebastian Metzger will show you why this will be such an important step, by showing off what can be accomplished right now using Polymer. Polymer is currently the most advanced and (self-proclaimed) production-ready library based on web components. Read more…

October 13, 2015 — In this article, Maximiliano Firtman will review the platforms available today, what you can do on each of them, how to plan the architecture, and how to develop apps or companion services for these new devices. Do you remember the shoe phone from Get Smart? The shoe phone you saw on TV was followed by many other wearable devices on TV. Many years later, we can say that wearable devices are here and ready to use. We, as designers and developers, need to be ready to develop successful experiences for them. Today, Maximiliano will cover the most important platforms ready to support our content and services, what we can do on them and where to start in terms of languages, SDKs and emulators. Read more…